similarly described the genre as containing “some important memo-
rable, famous event... or... an event [that]... serves the whole nation’s
glory” (quoted in Terras, Handbook of Russian Literature, 344 ). The scholar
Susan Friedman argues that because epic norms, like norms of mas-
culinity, are “public, objective, universal, heroic,” women find it partic-
ularly difficult to write epics: “For male poets, writing within the epic
tradition has been an extension of a culturally granted masculine au-
thority to generate philosophical, universal, cosmic, and heroic dis-
course. For women, no such cultural authority has existed.... Their
very marginality as women writing has made it impossible to narrate ‘the
tale of the tribe’“ (“Gender and Genre Anxiety,” 205 ). The few women
who have attempted epics, she demonstrates, do so with “anxiety of po-
etic genre” ( 203 ).^11 In the nineteenth century such anxiety would have
been increased by men writers’ tendency to cast themselves as epic he-
roes—something women could not do because of the gender norms
governing characters in epics.^12
The protagonist, the epic hero, has virtually always been male. Onecritic describes these heroes as “champions of man’s ambitions” who
seek to “win as far as possible a self-sufficient manhood” (S. Friedman,
“Gender and Genre Anxiety,” quoting C. M. Bowra, 204 ). Another de-
scribes the archetypal epic hero as “not merely a representative man but
a national leader.... He epitomizes his culture as warrior, as imperial-
ist, and as explorer of the unknown” (Curran, Poetic Form, 173 ). A third
critic writes, “No poem can be an epic unless it presents a portrait, ei-
ther composite or individual, express or implied, of the perfect man”
(Wilkie, Romantic Poets, 20 ). The same critic mentions women characters
only as part of what he calls the Dido-and-Aeneas convention, which
“sees woman as an obstacle to duty” ( 13 ). This is a device, he adds com-
placently, “that appears with varying emphases in all the great literary
epics from Virgil on [and] is part of the pattern of heroic renunciation
recognized by any culture whose values have risen above purely mar-
tial ones.... One of the most interesting things about the Romantic epics
is their obsession with the Dido-and-Aeneas convention” ( 22 ). Fried-
man observes, “In the epic women have mainly existed at the symbolic
peripheries as static rewards or temptations, as allies or antagonists, as
inspirations or nemeses” (“Gender and Genre Anxiety,” 205 ).^13
In England the national epic remained a vital genre throughout theRomantic period. In Russia, however, the poema evolved through three
more or less successive stages: first, the klassicheskaia poemaor geroich-
eskaia epopeia(classical or heroic verse epic)—for example, Kheraskov’s
Gender and Genre 61